Unhappily land-locked in his early adult life, Frank Fraser Darling's fortunes changed when he began visiting Scotland's west coast in the 1930s. Surviving treacherous boat journeys, a broken leg, and hell-bent storms, he made temporary homes with his family on some of the remotest Hebridean islands so he could study the habits of grey seals and seabirds. The family finally settled on an abandoned croft in the Summer Isles, on Tanera Mor, and started farming the barren land. They repaired a ruined herring fishery and its stone quay. They fertilized the ground with seaweed, cut peat for the fires, and planted a garden behind sheltered walls. Slowly, they brought life back to the island. Island Years first published 1940 by G. Bell and Sons. Island Farm first published in 1943 by G. Bell and Sons.
Author
Sir Frank Fraser Darling FRSE LLD (born Frank Darling) was an English ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist and author, who is strongly associated with the highlands and islands of Scotland. While working as a Clean Milk Advisor in Buckinghamshire, and longing for a research post in Scotland, Fraser Darling heard about the work of the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University, and in the early 1930s the Director, Francis Albert Eley Crew, offered him a place there to study for a PhD. From 1929–1930 he was Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Animal Breeding and Genetics, part of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, at Edinburgh. In 1934 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Living at Dundonnell and later in the Summer Isles, Fraser Darling began the work that was to mark him as a naturalist-philosopher of original turn of mind and great intellectual drive. He described the social and breeding behaviour of the red deer, gulls, and the grey seal respectively, in the three academic works A Herd of Red Deer, Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle and A Naturalist on Rona. In 1944, the wartime Secretary of State for Scotland, Thomas Johnston, appointed Fraser Darling as Director of the West Highland Survey, tasked with gathering facts to inform future land use and management in the Highlands and Islands. His report, West Highland Survey: An Essay in Human Ecology, was finally published in 1955.
